facebook

Why I will never invest in Facebook

May 18, 2012 By Jeff Gibbard Leave a Comment

I’m no fan of Facebook, I think that’s clear by now; what’s funny is that at one time, I was a fan.

This image is real by the way.

There was a point in time where Facebook was the cool place to be. It was vastly superior to MySpace. It was clean, straightforward and untarnished…just a place to interact with friends and family. There were no stupid games, there were no irrelevant ads, there was no constant barrage of invites to apps, events and other garbage, it was simply a place to interact with friends. It was simple…it was good.

Then came the changes.

Facebook began to slowly change the agreement we had with it. What started as something that felt like ours slowly became theirs.

The privacy policy got longer and more complex. Interface changes were rolled out one-by-one. Features got added by the baker’s dozen. Privacy settings got changed without our permission. People hated each change, they bitched and moaned, and with only a few exceptions Facebook ignored them. The changes came so regularly that eventually we became desensitized to it, collectively we sank into a passive acceptance, willing to trade the inconveniences for the common meeting space.

To be clear, I live in public. My issue is that the changes generally have the most dramatic affect on the people least likely to know about them or understand the implications. In this way Facebook takes advantage of its users.

Growth

As the user base grew, Facebook became a necessity, one where the choice to leave became a choice to leave your friends instead of leaving the site. As Facebook grew, it added features in an attempt to branch out beyond friends connecting with friends. Many of these features were “borrowed” from other companies and sites that were gaining traction.

Newsfeed, now a standard social media feature was, at the time, a direct copy of Twitter. Facebook Places and the check in feature was conveniently released as Foursquare and Gowalla were gaining traction. Deals came on the heels of Groupon and LivingSocial. Facebook entered the territory of “me-too!”

Money, Privacy, and Mistakes

While Zuckerberg was still at Harvard during the early days of The Facebook, the following conversation took place:

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask.

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.Zuck: I don’t know why.

Zuck: They “trust me”

Zuck: Dumb fucks.

When asked about this later on, the Facebook board had this to say:

“He is a brilliant individual who, like all of us, has made mistakes.”

In an attempt to break into advertising, Facebook launched Beacon, and in response to this gross overstep, Facebook was hit with a class action suit…Zuck calls it a “mistake.”

Facebook changes privacy settings to enable “instant personalization,” another privacy gaffe is exposed as user data is shared without permission…another mistake.

How many of these privacy “mistakes” are really mistakes when the company making these mistakes is led by a socially awkward CEO who admittedly doesn’t believe in the notion of privacy?

The truth is that the erosion of our privacy through real name policies, constant changes in terms and the push for openness is about money, pure and simple. This is why we have Frictionless sharing apps…more data = more ad revenue.

Trust and endorsement

I’ll keep using Facebook because frankly, I have to. Too many of my friends are there, and working in Social Business it would be foolish to ignore the enormous user base that spends hours upon hours on the site. It is a necessary evil.

When it comes to my money however, I choose to invest in companies I believe in, trust and like. I don’t believe in, trust or like Facebook. It is a shady organization that has perennially breached my trust and makes mediocre products. Facebook makes unremarkable products for the masses; they are the Microsoft of Social.

I’m unconvinced that they can become profitable enough to justify their absurd valuation but even if they do I wouldn’t invest a dime. I have to go with my conscience, and investing even a dime in Facebook would violate my conscience.

Filed Under: All Posts Tagged With: facebook, IPO

This post, brought to you without advertisements

May 14, 2012 By Jeff Gibbard Leave a Comment

I’m at Internet week in NYC. Listening to the presenters, the panels, and the exhibitors I’m getting this uncomfortable feeling. You see I work with companies to humbly participate in the conversations they are lucky enough to find and graciously gain access to. Brands aren’t entitled to be a part of our social lives because they pay for it.

What I’m hearing here, is a massive push toward and unabashed embrace of social advertisements. One panelist claimed that over the next several years Facebook will dominate “display advertisements” in the way that Google dominates search advertisements.

The claim was that Facebook will receive nearly 90% of all display ad spending in just a few years.

There seems to be a prevailing sentiment that this is a good thing.

Mindsets

Social and search are fundamentally different experiences and mindsets…I’ve said this many times before. When searching, we are actively looking for something; we are more prone to click on an advertisement that meets what we are actively looking for.

When socializing, our mindset is focused on connecting with other people. Human beings don’t tend to enjoy being interrupted in the physical world while conversing with friends and family to receive offers and ad copy, and it stands to reason that they wouldn’t like that online either. So in terms of ad spend, social ads seem relatively silly unless you are driving traffic to a social account where the focus then shifts to engagement.

The bigger issue I take with this, is that social ads give brands the ability to pay their way into the social space, thereby eliminating the necessity to actually work their way into the conversations organically. We’re making Social Media another place to push to.

How does that make you feel?

The question isn’t how much money will this make Facebook? It isn’t about whether or not Facebook is capable of creating ads that people click on. They’ve already found ways of being creative with their ads so that “stories” can invade our personal, hand-selected newsfeeds, or make ads appear to be posts from our friends. Facebook is plenty capable of selling ads to the ignorant and wise among us.

The real question is, do you want to see ads when you are socializing? Furthermore, do the ads you see while socializing influence your purchasing decisions in any way?

The Beauty of Social Media

The beauty of Social Media is that it is OURS, at least it WAS. Our information is what drives these sites and allows them to generate revenue, albeit in a lazy, predictable way…ads. Social Media was supposed to represent a shift in power away from brands and towards the user. It is conceptually My Space. It was where we became free to express ourselves and tell our own story in a space uninhabited by brands.

With the massive ad push, it becomes more and more THEIRS. Every creative advertisement idea allows Facebook to sell our voice for us, and we don’t see a penny…but we DO get to see more ads.

Who is standing up for the bigger vision?

I’m all for monetizing Social Media but ads are lazy and unoriginal. I expected Social Media to move us closer to a more connected and personal marketplace. I’d rather see Facebook charge marketers for access to data that the users volunteer, then put the onus on marketers to be creative in forming a relationship. Similar to the way that third party tools have monetized Twitter, Facebook, etc, there are numerous opportunities to make money that don’t require selling users or bringing ads to our social interactions.

Filed Under: All Posts, Engage, Marketing Tagged With: ad, ads, advertisement, advertising, banner ads, display ads, facebook, facebook ads, ppc, search advertising, search marketing, social ads, social advertisements, social media marketing

The Problem with Facebook Timeline

May 3, 2012 By Jeff Gibbard Leave a Comment

You didn’t think I’d write an entire post about Facebook without following it up with a little criticism, did you?

Facebook has undoubtedly provided us with a powerful platform in Timeline, however, the implementation of it, is truly Facebookian. What could be an incredible idea for the majority instead becomes a great idea for those that choose to put a ton of work in.

Here’s where Facebook missed the mark…

Additive vs Reductive

Of course Facebook chose to make every past action and activity part of our Timeline. The process of telling your story isn’t so much a matter of adding events to Timeline as it is deleting events from your Timeline and this process of curation could take hours upon hours. In this way, I think Facebook missed the mark and discouraged people from actually telling a good story. Most people I’ve spoken to about it say that it’s not worth the time to go back and edit. Instead of replacing the “About me” section with Timeline, Facebook replaced everything with Timeline and what we get in most people’s Timeline is a bunch of noise, that does little to tell that person’s story. Had Facebook made Timeline a “start-from-scratch” product, I think we would see more stories being told. Instead most people see it as too much work to go back and curate their story.

I miss “the Wall.” The Wall is a feature that should’ve remained intact. If we think of Timeline as a story, which is how I think it is best looked at, then every meaningless update or shared news story should not be part of the story. Good storytelling doesn’t get bogged down with irrelevant details which is what many status updates are. Good story telling is laser focused, includes meaningful events and interesting details. If Facebook had kept the Wall and simply given us the opportunity to add things from our wall to our Timeline, we could’ve had the most dynamic profile ever.

To make matter worse, there are the apps…

The Problem with Apps

First of all, apps are not stories and frictionless apps are noisy, intrusive and just plain terrible. Story-telling is about choosing what to include, and again Facebook chooses to include everything. Most of these timeline apps are frictionless ways for brands to become part of your story.

What would’ve been nice, would be the CHOICE to include which stories from an app are worthy of making the Timeline.

Here’s how I would’ve like to see it handled:

Show all of my Foursquare check-ins from the Foursquare app in a “tab” so that people can look at all of my Foursquare check-ins, that were posted to Facebook, over time. That is a story by itself: “where did Jeff check in on Foursquare?” Then give ME the option of posting individual or aggregate check-ins to the Timeline.

Show everything I’ve pinned on Pinterest from the Facebook app, in a “tab” so that people can see everything I’ve pinned, and posted to Facebook, over time. This is a story by itself: ”what was Jeff pinning on Pinterest?” Then give ME the option of posting individual or aggregate pins to the Timeline.

By giving each app it’s own space, we could keep Timeline clean and neatly curated while still encouraging app usage. Instead, I find myself discouraged from using apps, beyond my opposition to the ridiculous amount of permission I need to authorize before using most apps.

In contrast to Zuckerberg’s Law

Ironically enough, the way Facebook implemented Timeline causes me to act in opposition to ”Zuckerberg’s law;” I find myself sharing less and less on Facebook as I want my Timeline to be a reflection of who I am rather than everything I read, see, hear, and do in my life and on the web. I am more deliberate, not less in how I use Facebook. I use less apps, not more. I click the “like” button less and instead share content to Google+ and Twitter.

Regardless of these shortcomings, if you are willing to put n the work and be more selective with what goes on Timeline, you can still tell a compelling story.

Filed Under: All Posts, Content Curation, Marketing Tagged With: criticism of facebook, facebook, foursquare, ideas, implementation, majority, mark zuckerberg, online social networking, platforms, problem, social information processing, timeline, timelines, world wide web

Facebook Timeline: The Best Story Telling Opportunity in Social Media

May 2, 2012 By Jeff Gibbard Leave a Comment

Many of you remember a previous post on this blog called: Facebook Launches 60 New Applications for Timeline: What It Means for Users and Marketers. In that post, I rip on Frictionless sharing apps.

It’s no secret that I’ve had friction with Facebook and that rarely in my history of writing about Facebook have I been complimentary.

I distrust Facebook because of their history of breaching our trust.
I think frictionless sharing apps are the worst idea on the web.
I think Facebook is a joke until they figure out how to make a decent search for their own site.
And I think that Facebook is far too noisy to be legitimately useful as content discovery platform.

However, I want to be clear that I am willing to give credit where it is due.

Credit is Due

While Facebook timeline is only different from a blog archive in its interface, this new profile is a social network game changer. The concept of bringing together status updates, pictures, and significant life events, and presenting that information in a time-based format is revolutionary in the context of other social networks. Again, while this feature has been available since the genesis of blogging, it wasn’t until Facebook—with its massive user-base and standardized format for everyone—did we see life-journaling presented in such a consistent and compelling way.

Whether we Twitter or Google+ fans want to admit it, Facebook is the dominant platform and for most people, the closest thing to a universal address book that we’ve ever seen. Finding people from our past inevitably starts on Facebook. When people from our past resurface, or new brands come into our lives, I believe Facebook provides us with the best opportunity to learn about people and brands.

My thoughts on using Facebook for Storytelling

The time-based format invites people to go back in time and explore the origins of a person or brand. Unlike Wikipedia, this doesn’t need to be an Encyclopedia-like telling of history. The story can be told in any way the profile or page owner chooses. In my eyes, Timeline provides a way to share the full story, to reveal as much as possible to shape the person or company’s image.

There is a story to be told.

Companies

the idea that got the company started
the founder(s), who he/she/they are, what they stand for, why they started the company, how they started the company
important milestones and turning points
the good times
the bad times

People

Significant Events from the day you were born
Old photos
Travels
Graduations
Birthdays
where you were for significant events
new friends
new pets
the good times
the bad times

All of these details help to tell a bigger story of who you are as a person, or the road your company travelled up until TODAY. Timeline gives us the opportunity to let others walk in our shoes, and for us to walk in their shoes.

Cover Photos and Featured Posts

The Cover Photo and Profile Photo are your first impressions, make them count. Do something creative, or something uniquely YOU. I alternate my cover photo based upon what’s happening in my life. It was my company logo for a while, wedding photos for a bit, and now it’s a thought bubble.

Timeline is very image-heavy, which is a good thing. Beyond the Cover Photo, there are featured posts.

To me, featuring posts is essential to the format. Statistically speaking, images are the most engaging post type and making the photos larger, in my opinion, looks much more interesting. I’ve chosen, in my timeline, to feature every post I’m capable of featuring. I’ve gone back and attempted to add photographs wherever possible…again, I think this makes the timeline viewing experience much more compelling. As you scroll back through time, you can see each event as represented through images. In addition to the image, be sure to include a story about that period in your life, or the history of the brand.

Tell your story

I recommend you set aside a few hours on a weekend and go back through your timeline. It is an amazing story telling opportunity, I suggest you take advantage of it.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post about “the Problems with Timeline.”

Filed Under: Content Curation, Marketing Tagged With: facebook, story-telling, timeline

In defense of Google+

April 17, 2012 By Jeff Gibbard Leave a Comment

Is there a more asinine argument than who will “win” the social networking war? Social Media is NOT “winner take all.”

These conversations about Facebook dominating Google+ or how much more important Pinterest is than Google+ are ridiculous.

These conversations revolve around several metrics that are used to define value: Time on Site and Unique Visitors.

Those are the metrics that advertisers use to determine value because they equate to impressions which equate to ad revenue. Let’s flip the equation and instead focus on utility, that is, the value that the site has to the users.

Utility

Let’s start with a simple question:

In an unofficial poll of my Facebook, Twitter and Google+ networks, the ONE function that Facebook has is: sharing information with friends and family. THAT’S IT! No one gave me a single answer outside of that. If you really think about it, Facebook is a massive one trick pony and it is undeniable that they are currently the best at that one trick.

On the other hand, if you think about your day from start to finish how many different Google products do you use? Let’s just say that search is the ONLY Google product that you use, can you honestly imagine the web without it? Are you desperately seeking an alternative in search engine technology? Whether you are looking for a someone’s bio, the menu for a take-out pizza place or the phone number for your daughter’s school, you are turning to Google…not Facebook.

To make the competition about Google+ vs Facebook is to ignore the reality that Google+ is part of Google! This is not a scrappy upstart, this is a component of the most utilized site on the web. Google is the pathway to virtually everything for a majority of people on the web. Facebook is still only about friends. If you disagree, please tell me what else you use Facebook for: Facebook Poll.

Google+: The Facebook Copycat

Another statement that is often uttered around the web is that Google+ is just copying Facebook.

For those that think that, let me ask you this…WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN OVER THE LAST DECADE? This is Social Media, EVERYONE copies EVERYONE.

That news feed you’ve got on Facebook? Thank you Twitter.
The check in feature on Facebook? Thank you Foursquare.
The wall? Thank you MySpace!

It’s the web, copying happens.

So let’s just accept that sites copy other sites and stop pretending that our site is original and unique.

Google+ is not Facebook and seriously, let’s all be thankful for that.

The world doesn’t need another Facebook…one Zuckerberg is plenty for this world. Google+ is not Facebook, here’s why:

Try searching for a topic on Facebook and then on Google+, see what happens…only one of them returns relevant information and people
Privacy is in OUR hands thanks to circles (which Facebook promptly tried to mimic)
Your data can be extracted and deleted from Google+
The +1 button, unlike the Like button, has actual search implications
Hangouts vs Facebook video chat, you be the judge about which video conferencing tool is more powerful
Games are separated out from the main stream on Google+ (No I don’t want to be in your Mafia family, or water your crops)
You don’t need to authorize apps to have access to your social security number, birthday, entire social graph and shoe size to watch a video.

Google+ is more like Google 2.0, so rather than try to make it into Google’s Facebook, why not appreciate it for what it is?

Google+ and the “Ghost Town” Argument

This one infuriates me!

“Google+ is a ghost town.”

This is often said by someone who has not spent more than 5 minutes on Google+, doesn’t want to even see Google+ for what it is and would rather be a close minded hater.

Google+ is not a ghost town, your friends just aren’t all there. So instead of using that as a reason to retreat to the safety of your Farmville, why not give Google+ a few days? I’ve found some truly fascinating people on Google+. I’ve found photographers, cooks, foodies, athletes and thought leaders. In this way, Google+ is more like Twitter and less like Facebook. Spend an hour or two populating circles with things you are interested in before declaring Google+ dead.

If Google+ is too quiet for you, it means that you haven’t put in the effort to find people. But then again you may just be used to the noise on Facebook, so Google+ may seem too quiet.

And the winner is…

I prefer Google+ but that doesn’t mean that Facebook is going anywhere. Most of you reading this probably prefer Facebook, because Grandma isn’t going to “get” Google+.

Whatever your preference is, that’s fine, but let’s stop making these simplistic arguments. No one is going to win this whole thing and Google+ doesn’t need to be anything more than what it is, a fantastic social layer on top of Google that is less than one year old.

Filed Under: All Posts Tagged With: competition, facebook, google, google plus, pinterest, winning

The Rising Privacy Niche of Social Networking

March 27, 2012 By Sumit Pathak Leave a Comment

Social media or any depictions of our curated selves online have become a norm more than a luxury in under a decade. Mostly with your explicit permission, every detail about your mundane life can be posted online to enhance your appearance. It doesn’t matter if you’re a 14 year old trying to be cool at school or if you’re a medical student trying to keep your online presence free from those raunchy Spring Break photos, there’s one thing common among all: the increasingly convoluted privacy concerns. The bastion of social interaction, Facebook, suffers from a surprisingly balanced amount of grievances and lauded claims of global importance. So what happens when a ridiculously large social network has to struggle to pacify its burgeoning membership along with constantly exploring new avenues of monetization? What is does, is create a gap.

An Important Gap

This gap provides entrepreneurs, social media enthusiasts and bloggers the ripe opportunity to create or support something new. By tapping into the collective grievances of all Facebookers who just cannot stop bitching about Timeline, the new photo display format or not being able to easily change privacy settings, some social media startups have already started leveraging a new competitive advantage: Not being Facebook.

Arguably, Google+ seemed to have stepped in the right direction with highly structured and tiered sharing. Barring all sarcastic comments referring to its long-term viability, Google+ did tout privacy and sharing controls as its greatest feature.

The Anti-Facebook

Late last year, Unthink launched calling itself just that: an Anti-Facebook social community. With adequate funding, unthink is promoting just one thing: You are not a user, but an owner.

Unlike Facebook, unthink claims to not sell your information or user data to advertisers. Being private or public is entirely your choice. Unthink claims to even give you the choice of communicating separately with companies and users; with incentivized points system for engagement with a brand. Unthink may be ambitious to directly compete against Facebook while also competing against Twitter, Groupon and LinkedIn through specific services, but they aren’t the only ones.

Social Live

Social Live (SL) is another player in this space, seems to be a combination of Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and Myspace (yeesh!) but not just a bastard child spawned from a nasty social experiment gone wrong in the basement of a social media swinger’s club.

Amusingly named Warrior Girl Corp. reiterates Facebook users’ collective disdain with privacy controls. SL wants to give you theme management, simple settings and notifications, one click blog posts, custom pages, ability to have attachments, PMs, events, live chats, a feed like Facebook’s newsfeed, forums, tagging, polls, quizzes, videos, shout box, emoticons and other features.

Whooh, that’s a mouthful.

Personally, aside from some new features, this doesn’t seem any different from Facebook to me. But just having better control and simpler privacy settings along with publishing my own blog simply out of day-to-day online lurking already has me intrigued. Of course, none of this works if it looks ugly or if the PR speak does not match the UI/UX.

Well, let’s just wait and see.

* * * * *

Sumit Pathak and I attended the LeBow College of Business at Drexel University MBA Program together. Sumit is currently studying law with an emphasis on Intellectual Property at New York Law School. Aside from his stellar academic credentials, Sumit is a geek, a gamer and the earliest of adopters. He always knows about the newest technology weeks and months before I even hear about the rumor. He is someone who I hold in the highest esteem for his intelligence, personality as well as his insights on technology and culture.

Filed Under: All Posts, Guest Bloggers Tagged With: control, facebook, google, privacy, privacy concerns, privacy controls, privacy issues, social networks, social sites, unthink

Facebook Launches 60 New Applications for Timeline: What It Means for Users and Marketers.

January 19, 2012 By Jeff Gibbard 2 Comments

Last night, at 8pm Eastern Standard Time, Facebook unveiled the next evolution in the Facebook platform. Following up on last year’s F8 conference in which Timeline was introduced, Open Graph was extended to “frictionless sharing” applications and Gestures were explained, Facebook has partnered with 60 websites that want YOU to set it and forget it. For those that don’t know what the hell I’m talking about here’s the whole thing in a nutshell:

Open Graph Frictionless sharing

Frictionless sharing apps apps let you authorize an application once, and then the app can post to your brand new timelines whenever you do anything in that application. To simplify further, click a link on the Washington Post Social Reader and it’ll share to your timelines, listen to a song on Spotify or Rdio, it’ll share to your timeline, buy concert ticket on Ticketmaster and it’ll post to your timeline. Get it? You authorize it, then go about your life and it will share every single detail about what you do (in that application) without you ever needing to do anything more.

Gestures

Gestures is a the clever follow up to the Facebook Like button. Now you can Verb a Noun. For instance, developers can create a bought a song button or a ran a mile. It’s simply a more contextual way to share activities and opinions about things.

Marketers Rejoice

Of course Marketers LOVE this. We want to build applications that automatically share to your timeline. We want to be the first on-board to add context.

I’d love to have a button that my clients could hit that said I just built a social business. How clever is that?!

Marketers are crossing their fingers that no one raises another privacy concern about the fact that they are being tracked like endangered species, sharing their every movement across the web interacting with things and sharing it with their social graphs.

Marketers are hoping that YOU blindly accept the new authorization and just blast the web with every link you click, song you listen to, activity you engage in. Every single action you take, online and offline, and share on Facebook is valuable data that we can use to determine your buying behaviors, create a profile and target ads at you. It helps us understand what you want to BUY and which of your friends want to BUY.

You can fill up this web of information with a full profile, starting with when you wake up until the time you go to sleep. Heck, we might even be able to track how you sleep so we can sell you pillows and white noise machines. Think I’m kidding? Zuckerberg is excited to get his Jawbone Up synced to Timeline, now we’ll get to know when he’s sleeping.

Marketing has a long history of blasting and bombarding. THANKFULLY we can finally do that again.

Users say “huh?”

But what does this mean for you as a user? Well that depends; are you going to enable these applications without reading what they do? If so, it means you can expect to share something accidentally. It actually means that you can expect to share something accidentally and possibly never realize you’ve done it unless someone calls you out. That “Red Hot Red Heads” article/pictorial on Yahoo looks interesting but just be sure you aren’t friends with your boss on Facebook when you’re looking at it at 1:00pm on a Tuesday. You will also have SO much fun when your friends call you out for ripping on Kelly Clarkson when in reality you play it on Spotify pretty frequently.

If others in your network enable these apps it also means you can expect much more content. Since there aren’t nearly enough ways to find new music or articles, now you can read what your friends are reading or listen to what they are listening to also! So buckle up because there much more time to spend on Facebook now. There’s actually almost no need to leave Facebook at all, you’re safe here.

Most people I’ve talked to don’t even know what these latest developments are, and quite frankly I think they’ve stopped caring anyway as keeping up with Facebook changes is a full time job…luckily it’s part of my full time job

Why this is SO great!

The whole frictionless sharing thing is great because it removes you from having to decide what to share. Truthfully, that was an irrelevant step in the process anyway.

As a user, I’m not so interested in what you choose to share with me, I much prefer just knowing what you are doing at any given time, without the need to actually connect with you in any meaningful way like a phone call, a text or even a Facebook message. If you’d be so kind, I’d actually prefer that you lifestream every second of your day.

As a marketer this is great because most users have stopped caring or simply don’t understand what all the new changes are about. This will help us spread our marketing messages far and wide. Thankfully now we can go back to the golden age of marketing, bypass the whole one-to-one connection thing and just flood the internet with crap, yeah, that’ll be nice.

Now click this link and tell everyone how you were just blown away by Jeff’s brilliance.

Filed Under: Content Creation, Marketing Tagged With: applications, apps, facebook, frictionless sharing, gestures, timeline

Focus on Clarity. You Are What They Read.

January 6, 2012 By Jeff Gibbard 5 Comments

As some of you may have noticed, Social Media Philanthropy looks a little different. If you have dropped by my Social Business Agency‘s website, you will notice that looks different too. These changes come amidst my goals and priorities for 2012. One goal is speed, I want all of my websites to load quickly and get right to the point. Another goal is clarity.
is a function is precision in communication intended to reduce the variation in how people interpret a piece of content.

In 2011, there was far too much variation in my content and messaging thereby causing a lack of clarity in what my blog is about and what my company is about.

The Implications of Lacking Focus

For me, the biggest implication from neglecting to provide clarity, was being boxed into a narrowly defined role of what I do; I was understood to be “you help me put up a Facebook page.”

No. A 5th grader these days could help you put up a Facebook page.

I help you understand why to have a Facebook page, what your audience wants, how your audience behaves and the results you can expect to produce from a specific and well conceived set of actions.

There is a huge difference between those two offerings, the one that the prospect believes to be my offering, and the reality of what I actually do. Clearly something was lost in translation.

Who’s Fault Is It?

It’s my fault because the truth is unless I explicitly state what I do, people will interpret my offering based upon preconceived notions formed during previous experiences or their “understanding” of other services utilizing similar keywords and phrases.

Cause, Effect and Solution

In blogging, I am guilty of favoring lengthy explanations over brevity, which is particularly odd given my affinity for Twitter, SMS and IM. Attention spans, especially on the web, are far shorter than in years past.

This decreases readership and interest. Attention is a scarce resource.

Therefore lengthy blog posts and over-explanations are “out.”

This blog has also lacked focus. I’ve been blogging about whatever comes to my mind at the time, often Social Media. This runs counter to the advice I would give a client.

This gives readers a fuzzy picture of what the blog is really all about.

Therefore I have reduced the number of categories to that which are most important.

In business, I am guilty of expecting people to have the same exposure to case studies, best practices and thought leaders as I do. I have assumed that they understand the opportunities and implications of participation and have therefore kept my descriptions of service to headlines without the benefit of explanation.

This leaves potential prospects feeling uncertain about the conversation they are getting into and instead choose to continue their search.

Therefore I have planned to clarify my services with greater detail.

What about you?

It’s the start of 2012. Few points in time inspire planning and change like the turn of the new year. Have you assessed the clarity of the story you are telling? Obviously YOU know what you do, but will a visitor to your site understand that? What about the “voice” of your social engagement outposts? Does the “brand” of your tweets match up to your company brand?

Ultimately your content will only mean what a visitor interprets it to mean so it might be time for you to take a second look.

Filed Under: All Posts, Content Creation Tagged With: assess, blog, blogging, change, clarity, collaboration, computing, facebook, focus, inspired, planning, social, social media, story-telling, tell

Social Media and the Beauty of Process

December 19, 2011 By Jeff Gibbard 2 Comments

Everything is Process

When you think about it, virtually everything can be broken down into a process.

By “process,” I mean the steps that lead to the conversion of one thing into another. My blog is a process of converting ideas into words and publishing them online. My business is a process of selling my skills to individuals that have a need to understand how social media can impact their business. My client work is a process of translating ideas into action into results, measuring those results and making adjustments. Keeping my house in order is a process involving other processes such as doing dishes and throwing away paper mail.

I have a friend, Amy Larrimore, that as a child, was fascinated with Taco Bell. She was enamored with the process. Each person had a job, and that job was specific and broken down into time-based tasks. It became the basis of her work and now she thrives on making processes work for companies, it’s what enables her to build Empires.

Henry Ford, revolutionized the car industry by implementing a new method of constructing automobiles using the assembly line…a process.

How can you succeed online if you don’t consider the process?

The process of utilizing Social Media for your business is often fairly simple: Plan, Execute, Assess

Plan

Everything I do with clients is a process and 99% of the time, planning is the first step. Planning is the part of the process where you identify each subsequent step understanding the time and capital it will take to accomplish the goal.

Planning: How to utilize Social Media

Understand what you are trying to accomplish: Are you trying to generate awareness, acquire new qualified leads, sell something?
Define your conversion: Are you trying to get someone to fill out a form, subscribe to a blog, call you?
Understand who you are trying to reach: Are you trying to influence 45-55 year old moms, affluent young professionals, diabetic men over 50?
Determine how you are going to reach that audience: You know your audience, but what do they do online, how will you reach them? Are they on Twitter, Linkedin, or just email?
Understand how you are going to capture relevant data that will help you drive conversions: What data do you need to “move the needle?” What time of day can you reach your audience? What content drives them to action?
Define how often to analyze data: Is your business going to make changes in real-time, over the course of weeks, months, years?
Define realistic expectations about time and money: How much time can you honestly set aside to blog, tweet, use Google+ or any other activity ? Is the expected ROI, or lack thereof, something you can afford?

Execute

Big ideas are nothing new. People have them all the time. What sets apart those that succeed from those that don’t is execution. It’s one of the distinguishing characteristics between an entrepreneur and some shmuck that decided to start a business. Typically, you will see those that execute have created systems that work for them. It may seem like creating a routine for Social Media makes it feel inauthentic, robotic and dull, but this is real life and this is business. The majority of social media users dip in and out of Facebook at will all day, checking on crops and bemoaning the responsibilities and stress of life, but YOU are a business person and you don’t have time for that crap. Execution is about doing the work, and for most people that has to be fit into an otherwise busy schedule.

Execution: How to get results using Social Media

Block off time in your calendar
Eliminate something unproductive from your existing schedule
Have someone hold you accountable
Develop a habit…but not an addiction
Delegate, if possible or share responsibility

Maintenance: Continually Execute

I’ve found that the part of that process that breaks down most frequently, is maintenance. This is the company that starts a Facebook page and 2 months later the most recent post is about “How to make money from home. UNBELIEVABLE!” This is the company blog that hasn’t been updated in a year, the sidebar has an “image not found” logo and the comments section is returning a PHP error. And this is the company that in spite of numerous inbound comments, continues to simply push out content

The reality is that thinking up the idea isn’t the same as carrying it through week in and week out. This takes work, this is what defines winners and losers, campaigns from social businesses and meaningful data from incomplete pictures. If you want to maintain, you need to have a process and stick to it.

Evaluate

In spite of the long history of marketing, many gurus and uninformed marketing directors never stop to check in on whether or not their ideas are working. Social Media is no different in this respect, you NEED to measure your results.

How to Evaluate

In light of your goals, determine what is working. Work backwards from there. Look for trends and patterns in both successful and unsuccessful actions.
Extract Actionable Information: Data isn’t there to make you feel good, it’s there to give you information that you can use.
Plan how to use new information moving forward.

The Loop

Maybe I’m wrong, maybe a process isn’t necessary. There are likely bunches of individuals that have succeeded without so much as a plan or time blocked off in their schedule. If you are me, and you work with clients who don’t use these tools like the average person, the process is very helpful and it helps you to avoid mistakes that could’ve been planned for. What do you think? Do you have a process for your social media usage?

Filed Under: All Posts, Blogging, Marketing, Measurement and Analytics, Work Smarter, Not Harder Tagged With: facebook

Stop the Noise! Understand filtering on Social Networks.

December 7, 2011 By Jeff Gibbard 5 Comments

Social Media has been praised for its ability to connect people across time and geography, bring the world a little bit closer together and open the dialogue between customers and businesses. Social Media is also a massively disruptive force in government and business due to the ability for anyone to become a publisher. While this has numerous benefits we now must suffer through the incessant flow of garbage that is co-mingled with truly valuable thoughts and ideas.

Social Media is often criticized for being noisy, and there is certainly merit to that criticism. But the noise is simply a bi-product of open publishing and a dearth of controls for filtering content by keyword or source. Fortunately I’m here to show you how to control the noise on several popular networks.

In my mind, Facebook is the worst offender of all when it comes to the creation of noise. Facebook actually builds their network in a way that increases noise. Between the new ticker and frictionless sharing, and the historically purposeful obfuscation of the list building feature, Facebook is intent on controlling what you see so they can generate huge ads revenues.

Their one obvious, ever-present solution seems to be the News Feed. They claim this feed of information analyzes your behavior to bring you what is most relevant. Excuse me, but, BULLSHIT! How on earth does ANY software algorithm know that right now I want to see my old college roommate’s information? How does any algorithm know that I just had a conversation offline about Puma sneakers and now I’m itching to know what Puma is talking about or offering? Here’s the answer, it can’t. And if Facebook actually cared about giving users the information they want, they’d make lists easier to create and more central to the content consumption process.

So if you find you brain being numbed by the repetitive and often irrelevant news feed, the answer lies in the creation of lists. It’s actually very simple.

Go here:

http://www.facebook.com/bookmarks/lists

And click this:

Now name the list. Then start adding people. It’s as simple as that.

Believe it or not, Facebook has had this feature for a long time, they have just made it too difficult to find. They’ve recently made it easier in an attempt to replicate the features of Google+ Circles.

Once you’ve created these lists, you’ll want to access them. Go back to http://www.facebook.com/bookmarks/lists and either click on the list you’ve created and bookmark it in your browser, OR click the little icon next to the list and “Add to Favorites.” Now you can see just what your best friends are saying, or family, or sports teams or retail brands. It’s your world, filter how YOU want.

Twitter

Twitter was one of the first to take on the noise problem by giving US choice. Twitter lists are a wonderful way to segment your Twitter network. Once you have passed 250 people in the Home Feed, Twitter becomes difficult to follow. So, make lists. It’s easy enough.

Step 1: Login to Twitter

Step 2: Click Lists

Step 3: Click Create New List

Step 4: Find someone to add to the list. Click the button at the right, next to “Follow” and click “Add to List”

Simple.

The next level is to start a Hootsuite or Tweetdeck account and search for keywords within those lists.

Google+

Google+ is built for filtering. Simply utilize the circles function in a similar fashion as you would Twitter lists or Facebook lists. To look within those feeds for certain info, you’ll need a Google Chrome plug-in (try this one), Firefox add-on or some other external method.

How are you handling the noise, what tools do you use?

Filed Under: All Posts, Best Of Tagged With: facebook